The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture (review)

"Darwin's effect on culture is perhaps greater than that of any other scientist" (1). One cannot agree more strongly with Barbara Larson's opening statement in her Introduction to this stunning collection of eleven essays. The aim of this volume is to consider his effect on visual culture, here, specifically artistic and photographic images. One of the principal questions considered is "What is the locus of the image maker within Darwinian ideas?" (11).

The volume opens with Janet Browne's enjoyable essay on "monkeyana," caricatures that illustrate the resemblance between human and monkey. Among them, one often finds Darwin portrayed as a monkey (not all evolutionists received this honor, cementing Darwin's preeminence as founder of evolutionary theory). These images "participated in the shaping of British nineteenth-century popular thought" (34).

Philip Prodger offers a detailed and fascinating discussion of Ruskin's often hyperbolic objection to Darwin's theories on aesthetic grounds. Beauty, for Ruskin, must emanate from a divine source; it cannot be random; Ruskin's criticisms induced Darwin to enlarge upon his biological concept of beauty. The essay pays special attention to their drawings of peacock, pheasant, and falcon feathers.

Darwin's considerable popularity in Germany was largely due to the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, best known for his evolutionist formula, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." There have, of course, been numerous studies of Haeckel's artistic legacy, most notably his illustrations of microscopic and marine creatures. Marsha Morton develops the ramifications of his scientific and artistic legacy in an impressive essay, discussing not only his influence on Art Nouveau, but on earlier art: Klinger, Kubin, Böcklin, and Munch, among others. Morton brings out the contrast between the vitality and optimism of Art Nouveau and the work of these artists of the 1870's and 1880's for whom "the presence of man 'in' nature evoked anxious, and frequently ironic visions of human and animal parity in a world of violence, suffering, and carnality" (61). The Darwinian element in their work was indebted to popular culture as well as to scientific texts, and the message of Darwinismus, represented "the dark side of nature" with its "debased" instinctual behavior (61). The sea offered the most complete symbol of this idea of evolution. In her examination of the scientific notions that influenced the work of these artists, Morton makes clear the convergence of manifestations of the unconscious (in dream, hypnotism, and somnambulism) with the regressive character of human drives and our evolutionary origins.

Robert Michael Brain's complex and ambitious essay, "Protoplasmania," is a good complement to Morton's text. Protoplasm theory brought together the fields of energy and evolution, and Brain takes the reader from the scientific foundations in England (Huxley) and Germany (Haeckel), through the undulating lines in graphic recording instruments used by physiologists, to the aesthetic products two and three decades later in Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau. Along the way, he calls on Alfred Binet's psychological experiments with micro-organisms (103), as well as the psycho-physiology of movement as it was theorized by Théodule Ribot and Charles Henry in France, linking each with protoplasm "seen as a substratum of all vital processes including heredity" (92). The link is more convincing in some cases than in others. For example, despite Henry's observation that the more complex a curve, the more beautiful it is, it is inaccurate to claim that his scientific aesthetics made the undulating line "the primary element of art and aesthetic language," thereby linking it to "the waveform movements of protoplasm" (105). His psycho-physical theory and his experiments on the effects of directional movement of line in the viewer, published in the book-length Introduction à une esthétique scientifique (1885) and summarized in several articles (for example, "Le Contraste, le rythme, la mesure," La Revue philosophique, 1889, no. 2) present a different picture. In the last ten pages of the essay, Brain goes on to tie...